In a word? GLORY.
If PR does its job well, the people who pulled off the campaign don’t get the recognition. Maybe their firm gets a mention and a little respect in the industry. But for the most part the individuals who actually developed and implemented a given campaign remain opaque. Like the Wizard of Oz! Pay no attention to the man behind the screen!
If digital strategy people do their jobs well then they get to share in the glory. They get to proclaim it, they get to take ownership of their successes in a way that PR people never really do. When you go into PR you are accepting the fact that a portion of your ego will be subsumed in order to further your clients brands and businesses.
“I don’t really matter, it is the client that matters.”
I think this is the source of a lot of the laziness and apathy that PR firms show their clients. And it is one reason that PR firms scale so neatly. When you don’t really care about each individual client, when you have 15 other clients (or 100), and you aren’t personally involved in the success or failure of that client, one simply cannot care as much.
But with social media, the marketers and strategists, the designers and developers, because they also operate their personal and professional profiles in online world, they are immediately and prominently linked to their clients presences.
But it also means that when that client has a giant success, we get to share in it. Because the veil has been drawn back. We tell you who we are, what we do, who our clients are and because of that transparency, we come a little closet to aligning our interests with our clients.
Image courtesy of courtneyBolton on Flickr
